WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war who was forced to resign from the World Bank because of an ethics scandal, will chair a U.S. advisory panel on arms control, the State Department said on Thursday.

The former deputy secretary of defense and advocate of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq will head the State Department's International Security Advisory Board, which gives the department independent advice on arms control, disarmament, international security and other matters.

Wolfowitz was forced to resign as president of the World Bank last year after a bank panel found he broke several of its rules by involving himself in the promotion of his companion Shaha Riza, a Middle East expert at the bank.

The controversy sparked outrage among some of the bank's 10,000 employees and prompted senior staff to write to its board complaining the leadership crisis had undermined their work, especially in fighting corruption. (Editing by Todd Eastham)

An Old Face ResurfacesBush Admin Offers Paul Wolfowitz Top State Department Job

Don't ever say the Bush administration doesn't take care of its own. Nearly three years after Paul Wolfowitz resigned as deputy Defense secretary and six months after his stormy departure as president of the World Bank—amid allegations that he improperly awarded a raise to his girlfriend—he's in line to return to public service. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Iraq War, a position as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board, a prestigious State Department panel, according to two department sources who declined to be identified discussing personnel matters. The 18-member panel, which has access to highly classified intelligence, advises Rice on disarmament, nuclear proliferation, WMD issues and other matters. "We think he is well suited and will do an excellent job," said one senior official.

Wolfowitz, now a visiting scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, will replace former senator Fred Thompson, who quit over the summer to run for president. Although officials declined to say how Rice came to choose him, Wolfowitz began his government career in the 1970s in the State Department as an arms-control expert; he forged a relationship with Rice during the 2000 presidential campaign, when they both served as top foreign-policy advisers to the then candidate Bush. But his selection has raised more than a few eyebrows within State because he'll be providing advice on some of the same issues that critics say the administration got spectacularly wrong when Wolfowitz was pushing the case for the Iraq War at the Pentagon. (One of the department sources called the appointment "amazing.") At least Wolfowitz, who did not return calls seeking comment, will have like-minded company: other panel members include Robert Joseph, the former National Security Council official in charge of Iraq WMD intelligence, and ex-CIA director James Woolsey, both strong allies during the Iraq debate.

The sources said Wolfowitz has already accepted Rice's offer to fill the part-time position, though it won't be announced until the completion of a standard check for conflicts of interest. But he won't have to worry about any complaints from pesky Democrats. The position doesn't require Senate confirmation.

OTTAWA - Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier says a department training manual that lists the U.S. and Guantanamo Bay as sites of possible torture does not convey the government's views or position.

In a statement, Bernier says he regrets the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual, adding that it contains a list that "wrongly" includes some of Canada's closet allies.

Bernier says the manual is neither a policy document, nor a statement of policy, and that he has directed it to be reviewed and rewritten.

Along with the U.S. prison camp in Cuba and the United States, the list includes Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Mexico and Syria.

Canadian Maher Arar was imprisoned and tortured in Syria.

The manual, which was used in the Foreign Affairs department's torture awareness training, was inadvertently released to lawyers working on a lawsuit involving allegations of abuse of detainees in Afghanistan.

"I regret the embarrassment caused by the public disclosure of the manual used in the department's torture awareness training. It contains a list that wrongly includes some of our closest allies. I have directed that the manual be reviewed and rewritten. The manual is neither a policy document nor a statement of policy. As such, it does not convey the Government's views or positions," the statement said.

OTTAWA, Jan 17 (Reuters) - Canada's foreign ministry has put the United States and Israel on a watch list of countries where prisoners risk being tortured and also classifies some U.S. interrogation techniques as torture, according to a document obtained by Reuters on Thursday.

The revelation is likely to embarrass the minority Conservative government, which is a staunch ally of both the United States and Israel. Both nations denied they allowed torture in their jails.

The document -- part of a training course on torture awareness given to diplomats -- mentions the U.S. jail at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where a Canadian man is being held.

The man, Omar Khadr, is the only Canadian in Guantanamo. His defenders said the document made a mockery of Ottawa's claims that Khadr was not being mistreated.

Under "definition of torture" the document lists U.S. interrogation techniques such as forced nudity, isolation, sleep deprivation and blindfolding prisoners.

"The United States does not permit, tolerate, or condone torture under any circumstances," said a spokeswoman for the U.S. embassy in Ottawa.

A spokesman for Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier tried to distance Ottawa from the document.

"The training manual is not a policy document and does not reflect the views or policies of this government," he said.

The government mistakenly provided the document to Amnesty International Canada as part of a court case the rights organization has launched against Ottawa over the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan.

Amnesty Secretary-General Alex Neve told Reuters his group had very clear evidence of abuse in U.S. and Israeli jails.

"It's therefore reassuring and refreshing to see that ... both of those countries have been listed and that foreign policy considerations didn't trump the human rights concern and keep them off the list," he said.

Khadr has been in Guantanamo Bay for five years. He is accused of killing a U.S. soldier during a clash in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15.

Rights groups say Khadr should be repatriated to Canada, an idea that Prime Minister Stephen Harper rejects on the grounds that the man faces serious charges.

"At some point in the course of Omar Khadr's detention the Canadian government developed the suspicion he was being tortured," said William Kuebler, Khadr's U.S. lawyer.

"Yet it has not acted to obtain his release from Guantanamo Bay and protect his rights, unlike every other Western country that has had its nationals detained in Guantanamo Bay," he told CTV television.

Other countries on the watch list include Syria, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.

"If Israel is included in the list in question, the ambassador of Israel would expect its removal," said Israeli embassy spokesman Michael Mendel.

The awareness course started after Ottawa was criticized for the way it handled the case of Canadian Maher Arar, who was deported from the United States to Syria in 2002.

Arar says he was tortured repeatedly during the year he spent in Damascus prisons. An inquiry into the case revealed that Canadian diplomats had not received any formal training into detecting whether detainees had been abused. (Reporting by David Ljunggren; editing by Rob Wilson)

The United State could go to war with communist China over Taiwan, according to the founder of the neo-conservative think tank Project for New American Century - the group who successfully lobbied the American government to invade Iraq.

"The Taiwan problem can explode at any moment," Dr. Robert Kagan told the German weekly Die Zeit. "Let's talk about a mid-term danger. It's not guaranteed that a conflict can be avoided if China becomes more democratic but it will be easier to prevent it."

But Dr. Kagan believes that the US has a strategic edge of China as Washington has established military alliances with China's neighbours Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and a nuclear cooperation with India.

Dr. Kagan, who graduated from Yale, and holds a doctorate from American University in Washington, DC, was a co-signatory of the 1998 letter to former President Bill Clinton urging him to go to war against Iraq.

The other PNAC members who signed the letter include former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld's deputy and disgraced former World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who outed CIA officer Valerie Plame in mid-June 2003, and the former US Permanent Representative to the UN John Bolton, who falsely testified to the Congress about Iran's enriched uranium contamination.

Robert Kagan is presently a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

lundi 14 janvier 2008

After four years of delays, the trial for two accused spies for Israel, Kenneth Weissman and Steve Rosen of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is set for the end of April. The defense—terrified of the public relations disaster for the Jewish state that will ensue—has employed an incredible amount of obfuscation, sabotage and stalling in trying to scuttle the trial.

New revelations indicate the case involves the theft and sale of secrets dealing with U.S. nuclear weapons.

Sibel Edmonds was a translator of the Turkish andFarsi languages working for the FBI. She was hired after 9-11 and her job was to listen in on conversations garnered after extensive FBI surveillance teams working in counter-espionage. After six months, she reported serious breaches of national security taking place relating to what she heard. She was sacked and placed under a secret gag order by the attorney general.

Now, in defiance of those gag orders, she has come forward with explosive information regarding Israeli spying and the stealing of U.S. nuclear secrets with the intention of selling them on the black market. In the British newspaper Sunday Times, Edmonds reveals that an international nuclear smuggling ring involving the intelligence agencies of Israel, Pakistan and Turkey, has been permitted to operate in the U.S. with protection from the government at the highest levels.

In addition to the theft and selling of U.S. nuclear secrets, this spy ring was also involved in money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and blackmail of U.S. officials.

The spy ring enlisted the support of (in some cases) high-level U.S. officials in building a network of moles (spies) in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

“What I found was damning,” Edmonds said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.”

According to the newspaper, the Israelis (working through their Turkish proxies) had planted moles in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology with several transactions of nuclear material taking place every month and the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said. “The moles were helped,” she says, “by a high-ranking State Department official who provided them–mainly PhD students–with security clearances to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities, including the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico.”

She said the State Department official also aided foreign operatives personally by “passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.” She also claims that the FBI gathered evidence against senior Pentagon officials—including against some in the Pentagon whom she said were “household names”— who were aiding these foreign agents, saying “If you made public all the information that the FBI has on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials.”

Edmonds’s list includes Marc Grossman, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, assistant secretary of state for European affairs and undersecretary of state for political affairs from 2001 to 2005. Arch-neocons Richard Pearle and Paul Wolfowitz were both investigated by the FBI in the past for passing classified information on to Israel during their periods working there.

Following 9-11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.

Again, the State Department official proved useful. “A primary target (of the FBI investigation) would call the State Department official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the U.S. because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans,’ at which point the official said that he would ‘take care of it’,” she said.

In the days and weeks following 9-11, hundreds of Israeli nationals, many of them known to be agents working for Mossad, were detained and then quietly deported back to Israel. One of the key players involved in this was the current director of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, (son of a former Israeli intelligence agent) who at that time was working with the Criminal Investigation Division of the Justice Department.

"The Times article then notes something that I reported 18 months ago. Immediately after 911, the FBI arrested a bunch of people suspected of being involved with the attacks – including four associates of key targets of FBI's counterintelligence operations. Sibel heard the targets tell Marc Grossman: 'We need to get them out of the U.S. because we can't afford for them to spill the beans.' Grossman duly facilitated their release from jail and the suspects immediately left the country without further investigation or interrogation.

"Let me repeat that for emphasis: The #3 guy at the State Dept. facilitated the immediate release of 911 suspects at the request of targets of the FBI's investigation."

Corruption and a massive cover-up organized at the highest levels of government – America's nuclear secrets and technology looted on a massive scale, and sold to our enemies via a network set up by our alleged foreign "friends," while the threat of nuclear terrorism hangs over our country like a thick fog of fear, and warmongering politicians scare us into going along with the program – if even half of what Edmonds alleges turns out to be true, then we are all in some very big trouble.----

The former FBI translator has named all the individuals who -- she says -- played a role in the convoluted tale of treasonous activity that she uncovered while working for the Bureau. The information comes to us in an interesting way: She provided photos, and lukery provides names. As added value, I'm including a few biographical details. (Larisa Alexandrovna offers her own list here.)

Here they are:

1. Pentagon and State Department officials...Richard Perle: Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee (2001-2003), leading member of neocon groups PNAC, JINSA and WINEP.(He's a registered Democrat, believe it or not, out of respect for Scoop Jackson.)

Douglas Feith: Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, 2001-2005; head of the Office of Special Plans (Pentagon intel/propaganda unit accused of using forged evidence); JINSA.

Eric Edelman: Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs (2001-2003); former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey (2003-2005); current Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

Marc Grossman: United States Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (2001-2005) Met with Pakistan's notorious intelligence head, General Mahmoud Ahmed, just before September 11, 2001.

Sibel Edmonds has recently updated her website with a gallery of 21 photographs
in 3 groups, ostensibly of parties guilty in her case. Three of the
photographs are simply question marks, for reasons as yet unknown.

As Edmonds has said, her case involves "highly-recognizable, highly-known names", as can be confirmed below.

So what are these men guilty of? In response to this summary of the allegations, Edmonds as said: "as far as published articles go, this one nails it 100%":

Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish FBI translator turned whistleblower who has
been subjected to a gag order could provide a major insight into how
neoconservatives distort US foreign policy and enrich themselves at the same time.
On one level, her story appears straightforward: several Turkish
lobbying groups allegedly bribed congressmen to support policies
favourable to Ankara. But beyond that, the Edmonds revelations become
more serpentine and appear to involve AIPAC, Israel and a number of leading neoconservatives
who have profited from the Turkish connection. Israel has long
cultivated a close relationship with Turkey since Ankara's neighbours
and historic enemies - Iran, Syria and Iraq - are also hostile to Tel
Aviv. Islamic Turkey has also had considerable symbolic value for
Israel, demonstrating that hostility to Muslim neighbours is not a sine
qua non for the Jewish state.

Turkey benefits from the relationship by securing general benevolence
and increased aid from the US Congress - as well as access to otherwise
unattainable military technology. The Turkish General Staff has a
particular interest because much of the military spending is channeled
through companies in which the generals have a financial stake, making
for a very cozy and comfortable business arrangement. The commercial
interest has also fostered close political ties, with the American
Turkish Council, American Turkish Cultural Alliance and the Assembly of
Turkish American Associations all developing warm relationships with
AIPAC and other Jewish and Israel advocacy groups throughout the US.

Someone has to be in the middle to keep the happy affair going, so enter
the neocons, intent on securing Israel against all comers and also keen
to turn a dollar. In fact the neocons seem to have a deep and abiding
interest in Turkey, which, under other circumstances, might be difficult
to explain. Doug Feith's International Advisors Inc, a registered agent for Turkey in 1989 - 1994, netted $600,000 per year from Turkey, with Richard Perle
taking $48,000 annually as a consultant. Other noted neoconservatives
linked to Turkey are former State Department number three, Marc Grossman, current Pentagon Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman, Paul Wolfowitz and former congressman Stephen Solarz.
The money involved does not appear to come from the Turkish government,
and FBI investigators are trying to determine its source and how it is
distributed. Some of it may come from criminal activity, possibly drug trafficking, but much more might come from arms dealing.
Contracts in the hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars
provide considerable fat for those well placed to benefit. Investigators
are also looking at Israel's particular expertise in the illegal sale
of US military technology to countries like China and India. Fraudulent
end-user certificates produced by Defense Ministries in Israel and
Turkey are all that is needed to divert military technology to other,
less benign, consumers. The military-industrial-complex/neocon network
is also well attested. Doug Feith has been associated with Northrup
Grumman for years, while defense contractors fund many neocon-linked
think tanks and "information" services. Feith, Perle and a number of
other neocons have long had beneficial relationships with various Israeli defense contractors. (Philip Giraldi from Cannistraro Associates, April 24 edition of The American Conservative)

While Edmonds claims the Timespublished only 20% of her allegations, antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo has published a good analysis
that gets to the heart of some of the deeper implications of her case,
including Israeli involvement in 9/11, and the
American-Israeli-Turkish-Pakistani-"Al-Qaeda" (i.e., CIA/Mossad/ISI)
terror connections.

"The next president may have to deal with a nuclear attack," averred ABC’s Charles Gibson at Saturday
night’s Democratic presidential debate. "The day after a nuclear weapon
goes off in an American city, what would we wish we had done to prevent
it and what will we actually do on the day after?"

It’s a
question that frightens everyone, and one to which there is no easy
answer: none of the candidates really rose to the occasion, and most
seemed baffled. Hillary Clinton made sure she used the word "retaliation"
with unusual emphasis, and when pressed on the question of how she
would retaliate against "stateless" terrorists nevertheless insisted
that she would indeed retaliate against someone, because the perpetrators had to have a "haven" somewhere within a state.

Yes,
well, that’s not necessarily true, but what if that "haven" is… right
here in the U.S.? Or, perhaps, in a NATO country, say, Turkey?

Say what?

Impossible, you say? Not if you believe Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI who listened in on hundreds of telephone intercepts and has now told the London Times
that several top U.S. government officials conspired with foreign
agents to steal U.S. nuclear secrets and sell them on the black market.
The Timesreports:

"Edmonds
described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of
U.S. officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and
nuclear institutions.

"Among the hours of covert tape
recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior
official in the U.S. State Department was being paid by Turkish agents
in Washington who were selling the information on to black market
buyers, including Pakistan. The name of the official – who has held a
series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times.
He strongly denies the claims. However, Edmonds said: ‘He was aiding
foreign operatives against U.S. interests by passing them highly
classified information, not only from the State Department but also from
the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political
objectives.’

"She claims that the FBI was also gathering
evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names –
who were aiding foreign agents. ‘If you made public all the information
that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people
going through criminal trials,’ she said."

Edmonds brought all this to the attention of lawmakers, as well as the American media, and several news organizations filed reports – until a federal judge issued an unprecedented gag order. Edmonds’ story was deemed too hot to handle: if the public were allowed to know what she knows, according to our government,
America’s national security would be severely impaired. Yet now she is
speaking out, and what she has to say is unsettling, to say the least.

Edmonds has named at least one of the officials: he is Marc Grossman,
a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, assistant secretary of state for
European affairs under the Clinton administration and undersecretary of
state for political affairs from 2001-2005. Grossman is now vice
chairman of The Cohen Group, a consulting firm founded by Bill Clinton’s defense secretary, William S. Cohen.

Edmondscontends
that an international nuclear smuggling ring, associated with the
intelligence agencies of Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel, has been
permitted to operate in the U.S. with impunity. Our government, she
claims, knew all about it yet, in order to placate the foreign
governments involved, allowed a vast criminal enterprise to carry out
its activities, including money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and
espionage involving efforts to steal U.S. nuclear technology.

As
a translator for the FBI, Edmonds had the task of translating many
hours of intercepted phone conversations between Turkish officials and
Pakistanis, Israelis, and Americans who were targets of the FBI’s
counterintelligence unit. Thousands of hours of intercepted calls
revealed a network of moles placed in various military installations and
academic venues dealing with nuclear technology. Edmonds gives us the
details, via the Times:

"Edmonds says there were
several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the
Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. ‘The network appeared to be
obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,’
she said.

"They were helped, she says, by the
high-ranking State Department official [Marc Grossman] who provided some
of their moles – mainly Ph.D. students – with security clearance to
work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los
Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the
security of the U.S. nuclear deterrent."

And "while the FBI
was investigating," says Edmonds, "several arms of the government were
shielding what was going on." An entire wing of the national security
bureaucracy, associated with the neoconservatives, has long profited from representing Turkish interests in Washington: this group includes not only Grossman, but also Paul Wolfowitz, chief intellectual architect of the Iraq war and ex-World Bank president; former deputy defense secretary for policy Douglas J. Feith; Feith’s successor, Eric Edelman; and Richard Perle, the notorious uber-neocon whose unique ability to mix profiteering and warmongering forced him to resign his official capacity as a key administration adviser.

Edmonds
draws a picture of a three-sided alliance consisting of Turkish,
Pakistani, and Israeli agents who coordinated efforts to milk U.S.
nuclear secrets and technology, funneling the intelligence stream to the
black market nuclear network set up by the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan. The multi-millionaire Pakistani nuclear scientist then turned around and sold his nuclear assets to North Korea, Libya, and Iran.

This was no "rogue" operation, but a covert action executed by Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad,
the chief of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, at the time. The
Turks were used as intermediaries because direct ISI intervention would
have roused immediate suspicion. Large amounts of cash were dropped off
at the offices of Turkish-American lobbying groups, such as the American Turkish Council in Washington, which was reportedly picked up by at least one top U.S. official.

This
Pakistani-Turkish-Israeli Axis of Espionage, operating through their
respective embassies, systematically combed Washington officialdom for
potential moles, compiling lists that, according to Edmonds and the Times,
“contained all their ‘hooking points,’ which could be financial or
sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff
they had access to.” Nice work, there.

This sounds a lot like the setup the handlers of convicted spy Larry Franklin
worked with to glean information from the rabidly pro-Israel Franklin
and pass it off to Israeli embassy officials, including former Israeli
ambassador Danny Ayalon; Naor Gilon, the former political officer at the embassy; and Rafi Barak, the former deputy chief of mission. And there is indeed a connection to the Franklin case, according to the Times,

"One
of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a
former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing U.S. defense
information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an
Israeli diplomat. ‘He was one of the top people providing information
and packages during 2000 and 2001,’ [Edmonds] said."

Franklin delivered his "packages" to AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman
and their Israeli handlers for ideological reasons, but others, such as
Grossman – according to Edmonds – did it for money. Grossman angrily
denies the charge. In any case, apparently large cash transactions were
recorded on the tapes Edmonds translated, in which U.S. officials were
heard selling the nation’s nuclear secrets. As the Times relates:

"Well-known
U.S. officials were then bribed by foreign agents to steal U.S. nuclear
secrets. One such incident from 2000 involves an agent overheard on a
wiretap discussing ‘nuclear information that had been stolen from an air
force base in Alabama,’ in which the agent allegedly is heard saying:
‘We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.’"

A
vast criminal enterprise supported by at least three foreign
intelligence agencies acting in concert with top U.S. officials,
including some "household names" – if true, it’s the story of the
decade. Yet that isn’t all. The really scary aspect of this labyrinthine
network of foreign agents, and their American dupes and collaborators,
is its connections to terrorist organizations, specifically al-Qaeda.

To begin with, Gen. Ahmad is suspected
of having wired a large amount of money into Mohammed Atta’s Dubai bank
account shortly before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. More ominously, the Times
reports: "Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken
in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or
somehow aided the attacks."

Pakistani and/or Turkish operatives arrested or held for questioning in the wake of the 9/11 attacks? Well, that’s the first I’ve heard of it. However, the U.S. authorities did round up a large number of Israelis, including these guys, and held them for several months before extraditing them back to their home country.

Even more alarming is the reason Edmonds approached the Times
with the story, "after reading about an al-Qaeda terrorist who had
revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in
Turkey." That’s a reference to this Nov. 2 story in the Times, which details the career of a top al-Qaeda kingpin, one Louai al-Sakka,
who claims to have trained several of the 9/11 hijackers at a camp
situated outside Istanbul in the resort area of the Yalova mountains.

Now that‘s curious: a Muslim fundamentalist training camp in a country run by a fanatically secular military that would normally not tolerate such activities. As the Times
puts it: "Turkish intelligence were aware of unusual militant Islamic
activity in the Yalova mountains, where Sakka had set up his camps. But
they posed no threat to Turkey at the time."

Not a threat to
Turkey, eh? All too true: the terrorists’ target was the U.S. The
al-Qaeda recruits trained by Sakka were specifically chosen by the top
leadership of al-Qaeda – i.e., bin Laden
– to carry out the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. That
they were nurtured and steeled for their mission under the noses of our
NATO allies in Ankara seems bizarre – until one begins to take Sibel
Edmonds seriously. Then the whole horrifying picture starts to fall into
place.

The darkest secrets of 9/11 are buried at the end of the trail laid out in Edmonds’ testimony. As Luke Ryland, the world’s foremost expert on the Edmonds case, writes:

"The Times article then notes something that I reported
18 months ago. Immediately after 911, the FBI arrested a bunch of
people suspected of being involved with the attacks – including four
associates of key targets of FBI’s counterintelligence operations. Sibel
heard the targets tell Marc Grossman: ‘We need to get them out of the
U.S. because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans.’ Grossman duly
facilitated their release from jail and the suspects immediately left
the country without further investigation or interrogation.

"Let
me repeat that for emphasis: The #3 guy at the State Dept. facilitated
the immediate release of 911 suspects at the request of targets of the
FBI’s investigation."

Corruption and a massive cover-up
organized at the highest levels of government – America’s nuclear
secrets and technology looted on a massive scale, and sold to our
enemies via a network set up by our alleged foreign "friends," while the threat of nuclear terrorism hangs over our country like a thick fog of fear, and warmongering politicians
scare us into going along with the program – if even half of what
Edmonds alleges turns out to be true, then we are all in some very big
trouble.

In light of the Edmonds revelations, we have to
reconsider the implications of the question Charles Gibson opened with
during the ABC Democratic debate:

"The day after a nuclear
weapon goes off in an American city, what would we wish we had done to
prevent it and what will we actually do on the day after?"

Perhaps congressman Henry Waxman,
who solemnly pledged to launch a public investigation into the
allegations made by Edmonds, will wish he had kept his promise. Maybe
even the national news media, which has been offered this story repeatedly, by Ms. Edmonds and her supporters, will wish they had covered it.

Fortunately,
we don’t need the "mainstream" media to get the truth out to the
American people. With the new technology of the computer age, we can do
an end run around the media. This YouTube video is shocking:

As
Edmonds says, "we have the facts, we have the documents, we have the
witnesses. Put out the tapes, put out the documents, put out the
intercepts – put out the truth."

If a nuke ever goes off in an
American city, it will probably have been stolen from our own arsenal –
once the American people wake up to that scary fact, the rest will follow automatically.

mardi 8 janvier 2008

The protest at LEVIEV New York was the third since its gala opening on 13 November.

Wealthy Madison Avenue holiday shoppers were greeted the afternoon of 8 December 2007 by boisterous music and dancing, as 60 New Yorkers protested in a growing campaign to boycott Israeli diamond magnate Lev Leviev over his settlement construction in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Participants performed a joyous dabke, a traditional Palestinian dance, and chanted to music from the eight-piece Rude Mechanical Orchestra. During the protest, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz entered LEVIEV New York and emerged to jeers as he displayed a LEVIEV shopping bag to the crowd.

Saturday's event was the third and largest protest outside LEVIEV New York since the store's 13 November gala opening. The protesters highlighted Leviev's abuse of marginalized communities in Palestine, Angola and New York. In the West Bank companies owned by Leviev have built homes in at least five Israeli settlements. These settlements carve the West Bank into disconnected bantustans, seize valuable Palestinian agricultural and water resources, and isolate Palestinian East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, rendering the creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible. All Israeli settlements violate international law. Yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned Israel against its plans to build new homes in Har Homa, one of the settlements where Leviev's company Danya Cebus is building.

Midway through Saturday's protest Alan Dershowitz suddenly appeared in front of LEVIEV New York. "Just before he entered the store, I told Mr. Dershowitz, 'You claim to be for peace, but you are deliberately putting money in the pockets of a man who builds settlements and prevents peace,'" explained Issa Mikel of Adalah-NY. "Dershowitz responded, 'Thank you for telling me about this place. I'm going to shop here from now on.' It's not surprising that Dershowitz is proud to support Israeli settlements, despite their illegality and immorality. Dershowitz is also a defender of torture, and has proposed that Israel destroy entire Palestinian villages." As Dershowitz emerged from the store holding high his LEVIEV shopping bag, he was met by loud chants of "Alan, Alan, you can't hide, your support for Apartheid."

New Yorkers were joined by members of the New Jersey Star dance troupe for likely the first ever Madison Avenue performance of the Palestinian folk dance dabke. Riham Barghouti of Adalah-NY explained, "Our dabke performance at Leviev's store was an affirmation of our identity as Palestinians, and of our refusal to accept Israel's efforts to cleanse us from our land and destroy our culture."

Alan Dershowitz emerges from LEVIEV.

Participants were reminded of the breadth of Leviev's abuses when a stream of cars decorated with Burmese flags and "Free Burma" banners drove by the protest honking their horns in support. In September, 2007 The Sunday Times in London reported that its undercover journalist was shown Burmese rubies for sale, allegedly "blood rubies" used to finance Myanmar's military junta. UPI reported in October that Leviev was warned by the EU to stop doing business with Myanmar or face sanctions.

Protesters held signs saying, "Latkes not land theft," and "Dreidels not demolition" and "Candles not confiscation." Ethan Heitner of Adalah-NY explained, "I can think of no better way to celebrate Hanukah than to shine a light on the abuses Leviev is committing around the world."

Leviev mines diamonds in close partnership with Angola's repressive Dos Santos regime, and the security company Leviev employs in Angola has been accused of serious human rights abuses. In New York City, Shaya Boymelgreen, Leviev's US partner until this summer, has been the target of a campaign by local groups for employing underpaid, non-union workers in hazardous conditions, and violating housing codes to construct luxury apartments that threaten to displace lower-income residents.

Israeli diamond billionaire Lev Leviev, who immigrated to Israel from Uzbekistan in 1971, has bought the most expensive new property ever sold in Britain -a $70 million home with a bullet-proof front door costing $100,000, British real estate dealers said on Tuesday.

The 51-year-old businessman best known for his diamond trading company and who is estimated to be worth $6.5 billion ($8 billion, JTA), is expected to move with his wife and two of his nine children.

Adam Pearlman, the Jewish Mossad agent who once wrote stinging essays condemning Muslims as "bloodthirsty terrorists", has once again popped up as an "Al-Qaeda spokesman" to frighten the dwindling number of Americans who still believe Al-Qaeda exists outside of U.S. intelligence circles.

"An American member of al-Qaida warned President Bush on Tuesday to end U.S. involvement in all Muslim lands or face an attack worse than the Sept. 11 suicide assault, according to a new videotape."

"Wearing a white robe and a turban, Adam Yehiye Gadahn, who also goes by the name Azzam al-Amriki, said al-Qaida would not negotiate on its demands," reports the Associated Press.

Adam Pearlman is his real name and his grandfather is none other than the late Carl K. Pearlman; a prominent Jewish urologist in Orange County. Carl was also a member of the board of directors of the Anti-Defamation League, which was caught spying on Americans for Israel in 1993. Mike Rivero has the scoop at whatreallyhappened.com.

Pearlman has a knack of releasing his tapes at the most politically opportune time for Bush, having first burst onto the scene shortly before the 2004 presidential election and then again right after Katrina when the President's approval rating was tanking fast.

Even more mainstream publications, like the Los Angeles City Beat, have dismissed Pearlman before as nothing more than "cartoonish propaganda."

Pearlman had a hippy upbringing, a brief but intense flirtation with death metal and before a sudden transformation, once referred to Muslims as “bloodthirsty, barbaric terrorists.” Pearlman was a hardcore Jewish Zionist and wrote essays and screeds bashing the Muslim faith. He even got into fights at mosques and beat up Muslim worshippers.

Pearlman's personal history and the highly suspicious nature in which he suddenly professed his conversion to Islam in a single Internet posting and later appeared on the scene as a spokesman for "Al-Qaeda" are all the ingredients needed to draw the conclusion that Pearlman is working as a double agent and most likely for Mossad.

The Pearlman tape was once again obtained by the IntelCenter group, a U.S. government contractor, and it's head Ben Venzke has given the tape credence in media interviews concerning the story.

In our previous groundbreaking expose, we unveiled the ties between Intelcenter, a group that regularly 'obtains' Al-Qaeda tapes and the Pentagon. Intelcenter is an offshoot of IDEFENSE, which was staffed by a senior military psy-op intelligence officer Jim Melnick, who has worked directly for Donald Rumsfeld.

Intelcenter were behind the October 2006 release of the "laughing hijackers" tape that showed Mohammad Atta and Ziad Jarrah allegedly attending a 2000 Al-Qaeda meeting and reading their last will and testament.

Segments of the video that were interspersed with footage of the "laughing hijackers," Jarrah and Atta, showing Bin Laden giving a speech to an audience in Afghanistan on January 8 2000, were culled from what terror experts described as surveillance footage taken by a "security agency."

News reports at the time contained the admission that the U.S. government had been in possession of the footage since 2002, while others said it was found when the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and yet it was still bizarrely reported that the tape, bearing all the hallmarks of having been filmed and edited by undercover US intelligence and having admittedly been in US possession for five years, was released over the weekend of September 31/October 1 by Al-Qaeda.

The video also contained segments that were first broadcast in a British documentary called The Road to Guantanamo , which was originally aired in March 2006. The context of the corresponding scene in the dramatized documentary featured U.S. interrogators attempting to coerce Gitmo detainees into confessing Al-Qaeda membership by showing them fake videos where their likeness had been computer generated to appear as if they were in attendance during Bin Laden's January 8 2000 speech.

The monster in the closet is once again being waved in front of the American people's faces in order to quell bubbling national resentment about the ongoing carnage in Iraq and the fact that May was the deadliest month in terms of our boys returning home in flag-draped caskets.

Meanwhile, President Bush has authorized the CIA to bankroll and arm Jundullah, a Sunni Al-Qaeda organization, to attack Iran in order to destabilize Ahmadinejad's government.

While Bush grandstands in his Rose Garden speech about how Al-Qaeda wants to kill our children and as Mossad agent Pearlman rants on a video tape about a new 9/11, the only real Al-Qaeda are being equipped, funded and trained by our own government to kill innocent civilians in the Middle East in order to pave the way for the next chapter of Neo-Con blood-letting - while crude propaganda tapes are foisted on us at home in an effort to hoodwink us into supporting it all.

samedi 5 janvier 2008

Daniel Pipes, a neocon analyst and Giuliani campaign advisor, recently wrote a piece for JewishWorldReview stating that a Palestinian economic collapse would be good for Israel and the west. Throughout the Bush administration, warhawks like Pipes have been leading foreign policy and encouraging deeper commitments of the west in supporting Israel's open warfare campaigns against the Palestinian people. In his recent article, Pipes states:

"Exhilaration, not hardship, accounts for bellicose Palestinian behavior. Accordingly, whatever reduces Palestinian confidence is a good thing. A failed economy depresses the Palestinians' mood, not to speak of their military and other capabilities, and so brings resolution closer.

Palestinians must experience the bitter crucible of defeat before they will drop their foul goal of eliminating their Israeli neighbor and begin to build their own economy, polity, society, and culture. No short-cut to this happy outcome exists. Who truly cares for Palestinians must want their despair to come quickly, so that a skilled and dignified people can move beyond its current barbarism and built something decent.

The huge and wasted outpouring of Western financial aid, ironically, brings on that despair in two ways: by encouraging terrorism and by distorting the economy, both of which imply economic decline. Rarely has the law of unintended consequences worked so imaginatively."

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1207/pipes122607.php3

Pipes manages in one article to not only admit that the west funds terror groups, but that a complete collapse of Palestinian economies can only help Israel's agenda. Firey rhetoric by the neocons desiring an end to the PLO, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, and Fatah conflicts with American and British investments in the same groups that the west claims are such a threat to the peace process, including $400 million worth of western arms and ammunition that was 'taken' by Hamas last summer that was originally intended for the rival Fatah group.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56262

If we buy the propaganda of people like Daniel Pipes, it would seem that only by leveling the entire middle east with nukes and uprooting millions of Arabs and Muslims ala lebensraum style will solve the conflict. Calling for economic disaster and war, what the neocon and warhawks claim are at the root of the dangers the Muslim world presents to the rest of us, but day in and day out pundits working with the ADL, AIPAC, and various pro-zionist organizations call for the open destruction of the Palestinian state and its people. Even if implementing policy by force was a practical solution, funding terror groups and airdropping billions of dollars of hi-tech weaponry into the region can only hinder the west's attempts to pacify the Muslims.

Daniel Pipes has stated that he desires a peaceful end to the conflict in the middle east, but his comments and rhetoric betray his more civilized intentions. Some quotes from Pipes:

"Palestinians need almost as much to be defeated by Israel as Israel needs to defeat them." (Jerusalem Post, April 25, 2001)

"The implication is clear: if Israel is to protect itself, it must achieve a comprehensive military victory over the Palestinians." (New York Post April 2, 2002)

"History teaches that what appears to be endless carnage does come to an end when one side gives up. It appears increasingly likely that the Palestinians are approaching that point, suggesting that if Israel persists in its present policies it will get closer to victory." ("The Only Solution Is Military," New York Post, February 25, 2002)

"Israel needs to take more active steps...Bury suicide bombers in potter's fields rather than deliver their bodies to relatives (who turn their funerals into frenzied demonstrations)...Permit no transportation of people or goods beyond basic necessities. Shut off utilities to the PA... Raze the PA's illegal offices in Jerusalem, its security infrastructure and villages from which attacks are launched." (The National Post, July 18, 2001)

http://www.adc.org/index.php?id=2053

Muslims call for defending their homelands and they're called terrorists. Israel-supporting pundits and advisors call for attacking Muslims and overthrowing foreign governments and they're given peace prizes and cushey administration jobs. I think an old saying is appropriate here: 'two wrongs don't make a right.'